Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle Read online

  They bounced on the cobblestones of Gamlet, a half-Russian village, and the chauffeur waved again, this time to a boy in a cherry tree. Birches separated to let them pass across an old bridge. Ladore, with its ruinous black castle on a crag, and its gay multicolored roofs further downstream were glimpsed — to be seen again many times much later in life.

  Presently the vegetation assumed a more southern aspect as the lane skirted Ardis Park. At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the gentle eminence of old novels. It was a splendid country house, three stories high, built of pale brick and purplish stone, whose tints and substance seemed to interchange their effects in certain lights. Notwithstanding the variety, amplitude and animation of great trees that had long replaced the two regular rows of stylized saplings (thrown in by the mind of the architect rather than observed by the eye of a painter) Van immediately recognized Ardis Hall as depicted in the two-hundred-year-old aquarelle that hung in his father’s dressing room: the mansion sat on a rise overlooking an abstract meadow with two tiny people in cocked hats conversing not far from a stylized cow.

  None of the family was at home when Van arrived. A servant in waiting took his horse. He entered the Gothic archway of the hall where Bouteillan, the old bald butler who unprofessionally now wore a mustache (dyed a rich gravy brown), met him with gested delight — he had once been the valet of Van’s father — ‘Je parie,’ he said, ‘que Monsieur ne me reconnaît pas,’ and proceeded to remind Van of what Van had already recollected unaided, the farmannikin (a special kind of box kite, untraceable nowadays even in the greatest museums housing the toys of the past) which Bouteillan had helped him to fly one day in a meadow dotted with buttercups. Both looked up: the tiny red rectangle hung for an instant askew in a blue spring sky. The hall was famous for its painted ceilings. It was too early for tea: Would Van like him or a maid to unpack? Oh, one of the maids, said Van, wondering briefly what item in a schoolboy’s luggage might be supposed to shock a housemaid. The picture of naked Ivory Revery (a model)? Who cared, now that he was a man?

  Acting upon the butler’s suggestion he went to make a tour du jardin. As he followed a winding path, soundlessly stepping on its soft pink sand in the cloth gumshoes that were part of the school uniform, he came upon a person whom he recognized with disgust as being his former French governess (the place swarmed with ghosts!). She was sitting on a green bench under the Persian lilacs, a parasol in one hand and in the other a book from which she was reading aloud to a small girl who was picking her nose and examining with dreamy satisfaction her finger before wiping it on the edge of the bench. Van decided she must be ‘Ardelia,’ the eldest of the two little cousins he was supposed to get acquainted with. Actually it was Lucette, the younger one, a neutral child of eight, with a fringe of shiny reddish-blond hair and a freckled button for nose: she had had pneumonia in spring and was still veiled by an odd air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death. Mlle Larivière suddenly looked at Van over her green spectacles — and he had to cope with another warm welcome. In contrast to Albert, she had not changed at all since the days she used to come three times a week to Dark Veen’s house in town with a bagful of books and the tiny, tremulous poodlet (now dead) that could not be left behind. It had glistening eyes like sad black olives.

  Presently they all strolled back, the governess shaking in reminiscent grief her big-chinned, big-nosed head under the moiré of her parasol; Lucy gratingly dragging a garden hoe she had found, and young Van in his trim gray suit and flowing tie, with his hands behind his back, looking down at his neatly stepping mute feet — trying to place them in line, for no special reason.

  A victoria had stopped at the porch. A lady, who resembled Van’s mother, and a dark-haired girl of eleven or twelve, preceded by a fluid dackel, were getting out. Ada carried an untidy bunch of wild flowers. She wore a white frock with a black jacket and there was a white bow in her long hair. He never saw that dress again and when he mentioned it in retrospective evocation she invariably retorted that he must have dreamt it, she never had one like that, never could have put on a dark blazer on such a hot day, but he stuck to his initial image of her to the last.

  Some ten years ago, not long before or after his fourth birthday, and toward the end of his mother’s long stay in a sanatorium, ‘Aunt’ Marina had swooped upon him in a public park where there were pheasants in a big cage. She advised his nurse to mind her own business and took him to a booth near the band shell where she bought him an emerald stick of peppermint candy and told him that if his father wished she would replace his mother and that you could not feed the birds without Lady Amherst’s permission, or so he understood.

  They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.

  ‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.

  ‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’

  ‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.

  ‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’

  ‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’

  ‘Pah,’ uttered Ada.

  Marina’s portrait, a rather good oil by Tresham, hanging above her on the wall, showed her wearing the picture hat she had used for the rehearsal of a Hunting Scene ten years ago, romantically brimmed, with a rainbow wing and a great drooping plume of black-banded silver; and Van, as he recalled the cage in the park and his mother somewhere in a cage of her own, experienced an odd sense of mystery as if the commentators of his destiny had gone into a huddle. Marina’s face was now made up to imitate her former looks, but fashions had changed, her cotton dress was a rustic print, her auburn locks were bleached and no longer tumbled down her temples, and nothing in her attire or adornments echoed the dash of her riding crop in the picture and the regular pattern of her brilliant plumage which Tresham had rendered with ornithological skill.

  There was not much to remember about that first tea. He noticed Ada’s trick of hiding her fingernails by fisting her hand or stretching it with the palm turned upward when helping herself to a biscuit. She was bored and embarrassed by everything her mother said and when the latter started to talk about the Tarn, otherwise the New Reservoir, he noted that Ada was no longer sitting next to him but standing a little way off with her back to the tea table at an open casement with the slim-waisted dog on a chair peering over splayed front paws out into the garden too, and she was asking it in a private whisper what it was it had sniffed.

  ‘You can see the Tarn from the library window,’ said Marina. ‘Presently Ada will show you all the rooms in the house. Ada?’ (She pronounced it the Russian way with two deep, dark ‘a’s, making it sound rather like ‘ardor.’)

  ‘You can catch a glint of it from here too,’ said Ada, turning her head and, pollice verso, introducing the view to Van who put his cup down, wiped his mouth with a tiny embroidered napkin, and stuffing it into his trouser pocket, went up to the dark-haired, pale-armed girl. As he bent toward her (he was three inches taller and the double of that when she married a Greek Catholic, and his shadow held the bridal crown over her
from behind), she moved her head to make him move his to the required angle and her hair touched his neck. In his first dreams of her this re-enacted contact, so light, so brief, invariably proved to be beyond the dreamer’s endurance and like a lifted sword signaled fire and violent release.

  ‘Finish your tea, my precious,’ called Marina.

  Presently, as Marina had promised, the two children went upstairs. ‘Why do stairs creak so desperately, when two children go upstairs,’ she thought, looking up at the balustrade along which two left hands progressed with strikingly similar flips and glides like siblings taking their first dancing lesson. ‘After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that.’ The same slow heave, she in front, he behind, took them over the last two steps, and the staircase was silent again. ‘Old-fashioned qualms,’ said Marina.

  6

  Ada showed her shy guest the great library on the second floor, the pride of Ardis and her favorite ‘browse,’ which her mother never entered (having her own set of a Thousand-and-One Best Plays in her boudoir), and which Red Veen, a sentimentalist and a poltroon, shunned, not caring to run into the ghost of his father who had died there of a stroke, and also because he found nothing so depressing as the collected works of unrecollected authors, although he did not mind an occasional visitor’s admiring the place’s tall bookcases and short cabinets, its dark pictures and pale busts, its ten chairs of carved walnut, and two noble tables inlaid with ebony. In a slant of scholarly sunlight a botanical atlas upon a reading desk lay open on a colored plate of orchids. A kind of divan or daybed covered in black velvet, with two yellow cushions, was placed in a recess, below a plate-glass window which offered a generous view of the banal park and the man-made lake. A pair of candlesticks, mere phantoms of metal and tallow, stood, or seemed to stand, on the broad window ledge.

  A corridor leading off the library would have taken our silent explorers to Mr and Mrs Veen’s apartments in the west wing, had they pursued their investigations in that direction. Instead, a semi-secret little staircase spiraled them from behind a rotatory bookcase to the upper floor, she, pale-thighed, above him, taking longer strides than he, three steep steps behind.

  The bedchambers and adjacent accommodations were more than modest, and Van could not help regretting he was too young, apparently, to be assigned one of the two guest rooms next to the library. He recalled nostalgically the luxuries of home as he considered the revolting objects that would close upon him in the solitude of summer nights. Everything struck him as being intended for a cringing cretin, the dismal poorhouse bed with a medieval headboard of dingy wood, the self-creaking wardrobe, the squat commode of imitation mahogany with chain-linked knobs (one missing), the blanket chest (a sheepish escape from the linen room), and the old bureau whose domed front flap was locked or stuck: he found the knob in one of its useless pigeonholes and handed it to Ada who threw it out of the window. Van had never encountered a towel horse before, never seen a washstand made specially for the bathless. A round looking-glass above it was ornamented with gilt gesso grapes; a satanic snake encircled the porcelain basin (twin of the one in the girls’ washroom across the passage). An elbow chair with a high back and a bedside stool supporting a brass candlestick with a grease pan and handle (whose double he had seemed to have seen mirrored a moment ago — where?) completed the worst and main part of the humble equipment.

  They went back to the corridor, she tossing her hair, he clearing his throat. Further down, a door of some playroom or nursery stood ajar and stirred to and fro as little Lucette peeped out, one russet knee showing. Then the doorleaf flew open — but she darted inside and away. Cobalt sailing boats adorned the white tiles of a stove, and as her sister and he passed by that open door a toy barrel organ invitingly went into action with a stumbling little minuet. Ada and Van returned to the ground floor — this time all the way down the sumptuous staircase. Of the many ancestors along the wall, she pointed out her favorite, old Prince Vseslav Zemski (1699–1797), friend of Linnaeus and author of Flora Ladorica, who was portrayed in rich oil holding his barely pubescent bride and her blond doll in his satin lap. An enlarged photograph, soberly framed, hung (rather incongruously, Van thought) next to the rose-bud-lover in his embroidered coat. The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada’s maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert.

  On the first floor, a yellow drawing room hung with damask and furnished in what the French once called the Empire style opened into the garden and now, in the late afternoon, was invaded across the threshold by the large leaf shadows of a paulownia tree (named, by an indifferent linguist, explained Ada, after the patronymic, mistaken for a second name or surname of a harmless lady, Anna Pavlovna Romanov, daughter of Pavel, nicknamed Paul-minus-Peter, why she did not know, a cousin of the non-linguist’s master, the botanical Zemski, I’m going to scream, thought Van). A china cabinet encaged a whole zoo of small animals among which the oryx and the okapi, complete with scientific names, were especially recommended to him by his charming but impossibly pretentious companion. Equally fascinating was a five-fold screen with bright paintings on its black panels reproducing the first maps of four and a half continents. We now pass into the music room with its little-used piano, and a corner room called the Gun Room containing a stuffed Shetland pony which an aunt of Dan Veen’s, maiden name forgotten, thank Log, once rode. On the other, or some other, side of the house was the ballroom, a glossy wasteland with wallflower chairs. ‘Reader, ride by’ (‘mimo, chitatel’,’ as Turgenev wrote). The ‘mews,’ as they were improperly called in Ladore County, were architecturally rather confusing in the case of Ardis Hall. A latticed gallery looked across its garlanded shoulder into the garden and turned sharply toward the drive. Elsewhere, an elegant loggia, lit by long windows, led now tongue-tied Ada and intolerably bored Van into a bower of rocks: a sham grotto, with ferns clinging to it shamelessly, and an artificial cascade borrowed from some brook or book, or Van’s burning bladder (after all the confounded tea).

  The servants’ quarters (except those of two painted and powdered maids who had rooms upstairs) were on the courtyard side of the ground floor and Ada said she had visited them once in the explorative stage of her childhood but all she remembered was a canary and an ancient machine for grinding coffee beans which settled the matter.

  They zoomed upstairs again. Van popped into a watercloset — and emerged in much better humor. A dwarf Haydn again played a few bars as they walked on.

  The attic. This is the attic. Welcome to the attic. It stored a great number of trunks and cartons, and two brown couches one on top of the other like copulating beetles, and lots of pictures standing in corners or on shelves with their faces against the wall like humiliated children. Rolled up in its case was an old ‘jikker’ or skimmer, a blue magic rug with Arabian designs, faded but still enchanting, which Uncle Daniel’s father had used in his boyhood and later flown when drunk. Because of the many collisions, collapses and other accidents, especially numerous in sunset skies over idyllic fields, jikkers were banned by the air patrol; but four years later Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order and many a summer day would they spend, his Ada and he, hanging over grove and river or gliding at a safe ten-foot altitude above surfaces of roads or roofs. How comic the wobbling, ditch-diving cyclist, how weird the arm-flailing and slipping chimney sweep!

  Vaguely impelled by the feeling that as long as they were inspecting the house they were, at least, doing something — keeping up a semblance of consecutive action which, despite the brilliant conversational gifts both possessed, would degenerate into a desperate vacuum of self-conscious loafing with no other resource than affected wit followed by silence, Ada did not spare him the basement where a big-bellied robot throbbed, manfully heating the pipes that meandered to the huge kitchen and to the two drab bathrooms, and did their poor best
to keep the castle habitable on festive visits in winter.

  ‘You have not seen anything yet!’ cried Ada. ‘There is still the roof!’

  ‘But that is going to be our last climb today,’ said Van to himself firmly.

  Owing to a mixture of overlapping styles and tiles (not easily explainable in non-technical terms to non-roof-lovers), as well as to a haphazard continuum, so to speak, of renovations, the roof of Ardis Manor presented an indescribable confusion of angles and levels, of tin-green and fin-gray surfaces, of scenic ridges and wind-proof nooks. You could clip and kiss, and survey in between, the reservoir, the groves, the meadows, even the inkline of larches that marked the boundary of the nearest estate miles away, and the ugly little shapes of more or less legless cows on a distant hillside. And one could easily hide behind some projection from inquisitive skimmers or picture-taking balloons.